As the number of information sources in organizations are growing, it is becoming increasingly difficult for consumers of the information to access it in a logical and structured way that relates to the traditional business objects they find familiar within their organizations (e.g., customers, assets, vendors, staff, etc). Data from existing systems is typically made available in a very technical way that requires significant technical and development skills to surface it to non technical users in the organization. No workable mechanism exists for non technical users to add information within a logical business object definition without involving technical or development skills. Similar, no workable solution exists today that allows both technical and non technical users of data to access their information from multiple data/information sources in a structured business object like way, while still maintaining the flexibility to add additional information definitions to the existing business objects or to create new business objects from existing or new data sources without the need for complex solution development.
Existing Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) systems combined with development tools can be used to custom develop solutions which make data and information more accessible, but these solutions are typically hard-coded and require significant technical and development skill to maintain and change over time. There is no workable way for non technical users to change the definition of the structured data (business objects) or to add additional information sources or fields within existing business object definitions that might already exist within their organizations. As an example, customer information might exist in a CRM system, ERP system and a custom issue tracking system. Existing EAI solutions assist in integrating data between these systems, but do not provide a mechanism to see a single definition of a customer as a logical business object regardless of where the information is being sourced from.
In addition, information workers are limited by the static business forms and information presented to them by the solution applications or custom developed applications they use on a day to day basis. Regardless of whether these forms are thin client (web or browser) based or thick/smart client (windows forms) based, the information worker's ability to add additional information on-demand to existing forms based on its current state and context, is extremely limited. Existing form technologies depend on a developer's involvement to bind the form to a data source (web service, database, etc) which populates the form with information based on a user event (click of a button, etc). Should the end user require additional information to be displayed on the form, he needs to rely on application specific pre-developed functionality that might allow him to see additional information or data fields on the forms. This implementation however depends on the logic encapsulated in the application or custom developed solution. The challenge remains to empower knowledge users to add additional information to a specific form, on demand, regardless of data source, without the need for technical or development involvement. Once these forms have been customized the underlying platform needs to store each users settings in a personalization system which will allow it to recognize the user the next time he access the form. The result being that each user has the ability to see his personalized view of a form.
Still further, existing process automation tools do not provide the necessary level of modeling tools and concepts to allow both technical and non technical users to author a completed business process solution in a single modeling/automation tooling environment. It is extremely difficult for business analysts, business/process owner's technical people to use a single solution which allows for all roles to work seamlessly together to rapidly discover, model and automate business processes within organizations. Existing workflow and business process automation tools are disconnected and do not allow for a single environment which brings technical and non technical business users together with a set of tools that deeply integrate the necessary building blocks.